


Wings (What Are They Good For)

by Hecate



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Gabriel is gone, Sam falls in love. Post 5x19</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wings (What Are They Good For)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not mine, no money made.

Sam opens his eyes into a dream and sees Gabriel smirking at him. 

"This," the angel declares, "Is why I was fed up with all these wars. Seriously, one minute I'm alive, the next I'm spread all over the universe. How do you guys even do that? Do you give cookies to Death so that he follows you around?"

Sam swallows against the sudden weight that pushes him down and under, guilt and grief becoming solid and heavy. "Sorry."

A shrug. "Whatever," Gabriel says, and he's still smirking.

Sam wakes up.

***

After the first dream, Gabriel is still dead. Forever dead now, and Sam can't wrap his mind around it. An archangel, gone. Gone because of them and he's not sure if they can be forgiven for that.

God is a father, after all.

***

Another dream, another room. It's horribly familiar.

Four walls, a little world on its own, and it's filled with silence and something so heavy and deep that it threatens to pull Sam under and never let him go again. He walks into it anyway, follows his own fear. He knows what he'll find but he needs to see.

The shadows of burnt wings taint the floor, black on red, and Sam stares and knows what it is. Slow steps, and he's on his knees, reaching out.

"Don't," a voice says behind him. "Don't."

Sam doesn't dare to turn around, just stays still with his hand stretched out until he slowly pulls it back and wraps his arms around himself.

Lucifer stays silent for the rest of the dream.

***

"Do you think Lucifer can feel grief?" Sam asks Castiel once the angel returns, a little more broken, a little more like them. It's a horrible sight and Sam tries not to count the number of angels they destroyed.

His question is met with a strangely blank face, too controlled and too hard. There's something balling up in Castiel's borrowed body, a storm ready to bring on the flood, and for a moment Castiel is terrifying again. 

"I don't know," Castiel finally says, hands turning to fists, his eyes searching the window and staring out into the car graveyard that makes up the world outside of Bobby's house.

Castiel feels grief, Sam realizes, and he never got the chance to say good-bye to any of the brothers and sisters that died. Sam reaches out slowly then, puts a hand on Castiel's shoulder blades where his wings would be, could be. Aren't anymore.

***

"How?" Sam asks Gabriel and the archangel smirks.

"Told you, I got scattered across the universe. You just managed to catch a piece of me. Beats me how. Or why." An eyebrow rises, a grin follows.

"A piece of you is enough to do this?" Sam looks at Gabriel, looks at the beach they're on, the sky stormy, the sea dark and alive.

"A piece of me is enough to create a world. But you wouldn't want that, Sam," Gabriel pauses then, looks at him, his eyes hard. "You wouldn't want that, Sammy." 

Sam looks away.

***

"I dream of him," Sam tells Castiel. Pauses. "I think it's more than that."

Castiel nods, doesn't look at him. He never looks at him these days, and Sam doesn't dare to ask Castiel why, doesn't want to hear the answer.

"You shouldn't."

No explanation follows, only Castiel being a shadow of what he used to be, still a statue, still unmoving. But he's tumbling now, falling apart, the remains of a lost age.

"I can't stop," Sam answers. He thinks of Gabriel in that hotel room, Gabriel facing down Lucifer and looking so much like an angel that Sam had been sure Gabriel could survive anything. He had been wrong.

Now, he can't stop dreaming of Gabriel and he doesn't know why.

***

They play cards. Gabriel is cheating.

***

There's another scene on the DVD Gabriel gave them, long after the plan and the mocking and the sex. A quiet moment, Gabriel's hair dishevelled, his face strangely sorrowful.

For a moment Sam thought Gabriel just kept the camera running accidentally, the next moment he almost laughs at the idea. Things like that don't happen to archangels, even if they are the kind of angels that die in the middle of the story.

"Say hi to Castiel for me," the Gabriel on the laptop screen says, voice wound tightly around the words. "Tell him..." A frown, a flash of pain in Gabriel's face, and Sam realizes all over again that Gabriel was more than he could ever know, that Sam missed out on something.

"Just tell him hi."

The movie ends and Gabriel is gone once more.

***

"It's not him," Lucifer says behind him. Sam wants to deny it. Doesn't.

"Gabriel was whole and this...it's just pieces and..." Lucifer stops, breathes as if he needs to. And Sam wants to rage against him, wants to tell him that it's his fault, that he killed his brother. But he can't. 

Because Lucifer... Lucifer looks human. Mourning and lost, and Sam understands him more than he wants to.

Gabriel, the thing that looks like Gabriel and almost is, grins at them, sudden and sharp. "I'm so gonna tell dad that you killed me," he tells the devil and Sam stares as Lucifer turns away from his brother, turns to Sam, his face so open that Sam can do nothing but see.

***

Sam wants to ask Castiel about Gabriel, about the time before he left Heaven and turned into Loki. He wants to know everything. But he never asks, swallows the questions and thinks of the way Castiel looked when he heard the message his big brother had left for him.

These days, Castiel's face is a wound that hasn't closed yet, festering with despair and grief, and Sam can't touch something like that, not even for the obsession that took hold of him and won't let him go.

Instead, he reads of Gabriel and remembers him, the Trickster playing them in cruel ways, the Archangel coming to their help in the end.

Instead, he dreams.

***

"The most annoying thing about being dead is," Gabriel begins and Sam wishes he could control his dreams. He doesn't want to hear this, wants to forget that Gabriel isn't there, that Gabriel is in pieces and Sam only holds one of them.

"The lack of chocolate," the angel declares and for a moment, Sam is lost. Then he remembers. And looks around. A beautiful room filled with comfortable furniture, books and pie. Chocolate pie.

"But..."

Gabriel shrugs, opening one of the many books that are scattered everywhere. The pages are empty. Sam never realized that.

The angel sounds slightly annoyed when he speaks again; annoyed, bored and broken. "You never get the taste right."

***

"Do they know? The others, do they know?"

Castiel nods at Sam's question, his eyes on Sam for once. "Gabriel's death echoed through the world and through Heaven. They felt it."

There's so much more to these words than simple letters; there's pain, grief and the hole Gabriel left behind. It's hard to take in, hard to understand, and Sam almost wishes he couldn't. But he can. He's lost his brother, too.

And he's lost Gabriel.

Sam is quiet and doesn't ask how Heaven's pain still reaches Castiel. It's not important, Sam believes him. Heaven knows.

He's glad about that.

***

Sam paints wings on Gabriel's back, broad strokes with a black marker, and even in his dream it's a stinking thing. And yet, Gabriel lets him, stretched out on the bed, naked, his power reigned in so he's warm and touchable beneath Sam's spread legs.

Sam feels powerful like this even though he knows he isn't, that the skin he is marking hides something terrifying he has no hopes of ever understanding, but the illusion is enough to let him touch Gabriel. 

The illusion is enough to believe that Gabriel is truly there.

"You want to see them," Gabriel says, voice tense and familiarly bitter. "Everybody always wants to see the wings."

Sam puts his palms on Gabriel's shoulders then, flat against warm skin, and leans down to kiss Gabriel's spine. A strong body under his, solid and sharp, bones heavy. It doesn't feel like a dream.

"No," Sam finally says, thinking of the shadow of wings on a floor miles and days away. "I don't."

***

Kali visits them once, fire and death and frightening power. She gives them their blood back, gives them a weapon to fight Lucifer with once the time comes and the trap is ready to snap close around Gabriel's brother.

Sam only realizes then how beautiful she is.

Kali comes to him at night, looks down at him in a way that marks her as eternal and other and terrible. And he sees the Goddess, the worship of her people clinging to her every word and every move. 

"What did you do?" She asks him, and he's afraid. "What did you do?" 

Sam doesn't answer.

***

"You have to let go of me," Gabriel says, sadness and patience and forever in his words.

Sam turns away from him, shakes his head.

"Not tonight then." Gabriel's hand is on his shoulder, strong enough to seem real, strong enough to mean something. The angel pulls. 

And Sam falls.


End file.
